Maybe You Did Vote Your Pocketbook

SOMEWHERE, deep in the consciousness of American voters, is the idea that the representatives they send to Washington can affect their economic well-being. Candidates surely share this conviction. Otherwise, why would they bother to make promises about jobs, incomes and taxes?

It follows that if those representatives fail to bring economic benefits, they risk losing their own jobs. So politics affects economics, and vice versa — at least that’s the widely held theory. But what was the reality in last week’s election?

To paraphrase a Clinton-era mantra, it really might have been the economy, stupid. More than 80 percent of voters in an exit poll, conducted for The Associated Press and television networks by Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International, said the economy was a very important or extremely important issue. That percentage was the highest for any issue, including Iraq and terrorism.

Furthermore, electoral data and government economic statistics suggest that the economy played a role in the outcome: if your state wasn’t among the best economic performers in the last six years, judged by the growth of personal income, it appears that you were three times as likely to vote to throw the bums out.

That’s the conclusion from an early look at the figures, and it may even be true. But the actual relationships between politics and economics are hard to pin down empirically, and some experts may even theorize that they don’t exist.

Plenty of economists would argue, for example, that your local representative doesn’t really have much control over your economic well-being. In the long run, the nation’s capacity to produce is controlled by factors like educational attainment and the development of new technologies — factors that are difficult to change in a short period.

Moreover, your representative can’t do much, as an individual, to sway the world economy. The amount of your state’s exports demanded by Europe, Japan and other economic giants relies on millions of other dynamics, even though your representative may take the occasional rainmaking trip abroad.

Then there is pork-barreling. As a member of the ruling party in Congress — the Republicans, in recent times — your representative might have been able to funnel federal construction money your way, or perhaps to add a few pet projects in your district to assorted spending bills. In addition, your representative might have contributed to writing big legislation, like tax cuts, so that it favored people like you.

Yet something like pork-barreling could have a measurable economic impact at the local level, even if its effects are dwarfed by those of globalization. And the data suggest that voting for Republicans in 2000 did help some states economically. In general, personal income rose faster from the end of 2000 through the second quarter this year in states that elected a higher share of Republicans to their House delegations. On average, states that elected no Republicans to the House could have expected nine percentage points less growth in personal income than states that elected all Republicans. The average state’s income grew by 29 percent, so an additional nine points wouldn’t have been anything to sneeze at. During that same six-year period, the states’ economic experiences were hardly uniform. In rural states like Wyoming and South Dakota, for example, personal income rose by well over a third. In other states, like Michigan and Ohio, it grew less than a fifth. So there is a logical next question: Did voters hold their agenda-setting Republican representatives responsible for poor performance by voting them out?

It’s easier to answer this question if you leave out the six states that didn’t elect any Republicans in 2000; after all, they didn’t have any to throw out. If you also remove New Hampshire and South Dakota, where the percentage of Republicans elected dropped to 0 from 100 — New Hampshire only has two seats in the House and South Dakota has one — a pattern starts to appear.

It suggests that differences in economic performance could have had a big political impact, even though the overall changes to the delegations were small. In the 10 states where personal income grew the most, the Republican share of the states’ House delegations dropped only 2 percent, on average. In the other 32 states, the Republican share fell an average of 7 percent.

None of this proves a correlation between economics and politics, or, for that matter, any causality. To be sure of any of these statistical relationships, you would have to adjust for anything else that might have affected the economy differentially across states from 2000 to 2006: things as diverse as changes in tax policy or demographic shifts. Then you could tell whether the correlations were robust. And it’s by no means certain that they would be: looking at unemployment rates instead of personal income, it’s tough to pick out any patterns in the raw data.

Still, both parties have a clear incentive to learn whether these relationships exist. Winners who figure out why they won stand a better chance of winning again; losers who know why they lost won’t repeat the same mistakes.

Statistics or no, the Democrats already seem to be convinced. They have promised a raft of economic legislation during their first weeks in power, proposing to raise the minimum wage to $7.25, to cut the interest rate on student loans in half and to require any new spending to be paid for by cuts to other spending or new tax revenue.

Without a Democratic president, of course, it will be much harder to turn these bills into law. For that reason, voters might not hold the Democrats responsible for economic performance the way they apparently did with the Republicans. Then again, if personal income doesn’t rise, they might blame the Democrats — and the statistics might just tell the tale.

Correction: Nov. 19, 2006

The Economic View column last Sunday, about the role of economic issues in the recent Congressional election, misstated the number of House members representing New Hampshire. It is two, not one.